The Ever After of Ashwin Rao Read Free Page A

strong. Boredom? Not quite that either, though it seemed that if I saw children, it was for tantrums and truancy; adolescents, anorexia and related rebellions. Adults? Marital woes, anxiety, depression.
    I found my clientele homogeneous. Rosslyn thought my inability to distinguish them was a failure of imagination. At the time, her criticism annoyed me, but I might agree with her now. It wasn’t so much that the clients and their problems were homogeneous, it was that I wasn’t perceptive enough to differentiate them. My therapeutic interest is in framing individuals’ maladies as stories within stories within stories, the way people themselves are nested within families and societies. Presenting problems may be superficially repetitive, but they will also contain many unique facets. My challenge is to tell the story on the individual’s terms, giving a nuanced sense of his problems’ origins—in himself, in his community, in societal expectations.
    I came to attribute my blocks to my newness here. My clients’ aims; their ideals; the things they felt they deserved in life—much of this did not make sense to me, even after long, hard thought. I could parrot their accounts of their family histories, homes, schools, but these places and people were not imaginatively available to me. In talk therapy, I would tell my clients versions of their stories, but these were so much narrower, shallower, than what I hoped for.
    Rosslyn occasionally referred children to the practice where I worked. Anorexics or vandals she referred to whichever of the psychologists had a vacancy in our caseload. Native children and immigrants with adjustment troubles she tried to refer straight to me. I refused. She grew impatient trying to convince me.
She
was refusing, I thought, to see that, as hard as it was for me to help mainstream Canadians with their mainstream problems, the prospect of trying to address outsiders’ problems was even further from my capacities. She thought I would identify with them, while I feared I wouldn’t be able to tell their intrinsic psychological problems from the ones engendered by societal demands. Which story nests and which is nested? I would be the blind leading the blind up and down Escher stairways.
    The only exceptions were Indians. I saw two, in the four (or so) years that Rosslyn and I were together. One was—yet again!—an anorexic, a wealthy Canadian-born teenybopper. The other was an engineering student who had attempted suicide after failing classes and admitting to a friend that he was homosexual.
    With them, I attempted the method I had mused on for so long in the absence of opportunities to test it. They told me their stories; I wrote my versions; I gave these back. We discussed, they corrected, I revised, they revised; we worked, together, toward the future chapters, in which they became the people they envisioned—with increasing specificity, clarity, logic—themselves to be. The narratives broke up their monolithic notions of their identities, their histories, and, most importantly, their destinies.
    These two early attempts were ridiculously successful. If Rosslyn had thought me arrogant already (I was; I am), I must have become insufferable then. And yet these were the times she was at her most encouraging. She only wished I would find the confidence to use the method in the rest of my practice. I believed I was not qualified and would not be for many years, if ever. She thought me stubborn. Again, she was not wrong.
    Then, in October of 1982, my father fell ill.
    I arranged a leave to go back to New Delhi and spend time with him. Kritika also came home, but only briefly: she was, by this time, raising her own family in Montreal and couldn’t stay long. While in Delhi, I arranged to meet with a psychiatrist and a sociologist whose collaborative work I had long admired. I spent a day with them at the famous Institute for Research on Developing Societies (IRDS), looking in on meetings;